In order to promote a sound basis for considering the role of nuclear in climate change, this review spans the technical topics of social and political debate surrounding nuclear energy with a focus on the objective science of these issues including nuclear waste, accidents and overall risk. Novel aspects include the emergence of nuclear energy as being potentially renewable and the antithesis of Fukushima being an argument for the unacceptable risks associated with the use of nuclear energy.

In October 2009, the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board (Board or NWTRB) published Survey of National Programs for Managing High-Level Radioactive Waste and Spent Nuclear Fuel.  For each of the 13 national programs studied, the report catalogued 15 institutional arrangements that had been set in place and 15 technical approaches that had been taken to design repository systems for the long-term management of high-activity radioactive waste.

The question of whether centralized storage of civilian spent nuclear fuel (SNF) should be part of the federal waste management system as an intermediate step before permanent disposal has been debated for more than four decades. Centralized storage facilities were included as a potential component of the U.S. spent fuel management system in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 (NWPA), but the NWPA did not identify these facilities as being essential.